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The internet has gone from a high-trust society to a low-trust society, all in the span of a couple of decades. Enshittification strikes again. And it doesn't

The internet has gone from a high-trust society to a low-trust society, all in the span of a couple of decades. Enshittification strikes again. And it doesn't have appear to have any means to rid itself of the bad apples. A sad situation all around.

PessimalDecimal 9mo ago
It might be more accurate to say that a lot of low-trust societies have become connected to the Internet which weren't nearly as online a couple of decades ago. For example, a huge fraction of the world's spam originates from Russia, India and Bangladesh. And we know that a lot of the romance scams are perpetrated by Chinese gangs operating out of quasi-lawless parts of Myanmar. Not so much from, say, Switzerland.
- kgeist 9mo ago
  Russia has been among the top sources of spam since the early 2000s, it's not like anything changed lately. Mail-order bride scams and similar peaked in like 2005. It doesn't take a lot of people to send spam, I don't think it's correlated with the general population's online presence. I'd actually say it's quite the opposite: in 2026, Russia has never been more disconnected from the Western parts of the Internet than it is now (the Russian Internet watchdog blocks like 30% of foreign resources since a few years ago, while Russian IPs are routinely banned on Western sites after 2022, I can barely open anything without a VPN). For that reason, and because of limited English proficiency, Russian netizens rarely visit foreign resources these days, except for a few platforms without a good Russian replacement like Instagram and YouTube (both banned btw, only via a VPN), where they usually stay mostly within their Russian-speaking communities. I'm not sure why any of them would be the reason the Internet as a whole has supposedly become low-trust. The OP in question is some SEO company using an LLM to churn out sites with "unique content." We already had this stuff 20 years ago, except the "unique content" was generated by scripts that replaced words with synonyms. Nothing really new here.
  - marginalia_nu 9mo ago
    Prigozhin falling out of the metaphorical window also seems to have tempered the amount of political stuff coming directly from Russia.
  - expedition32 9mo ago
    Yeah blaming Russians and Chinese for the internet turning to shit is ludicrous. Chinese have their own internet anyway- it was a shock to me at first just how little the average Chinese citizen really cares about Western culture or society. They have their own problems ofcourse but it has nothing to do with us No it's the tens of billions of mostly American capital going into AI data centers and large bullshit models.
    - marginalia_nu 9mo ago
      It's not completely unfounded. A lot of cyber crime adjacent stuff targeting the west is coming from China and Russia. This is a consequence of these countries not having functioning law enforcement cooperation with the west, as well as chilly bordering on hostile diplomatic relations. It's not (always) sanctioned by the governments of these countries, but it's not entirely unwelcome either. Though all that stuff is a very different thing from what's being discussed in this thread.
      - sunaookami 9mo ago
        >A lot of cyber crime adjacent stuff targeting the west is coming from China and Russia. If you trust your government's propaganda that is used to jusitfy "hackbacks" and buying 0-days on the darkweb that fucks us all.
        marginalia_nu 9mo ago
        Eh, you don't really need to trust any propaganda to see this. Set up an nginx on a public IP and tail its logs. Vulnerability scans will hit you literally non stop so long as it's a western IP. Block China and Russia IPs and it drops by like 90%. Don't get me wrong the west isn't doing much to enforce Russian or Chinese complaints either. It's really just a messy diplomatic situation all around.
- blell 9mo ago
  70% of the GDP of Laos comes from scamming people in the first world. "A report by the Global Initiative on Transnational Organised Crime (based on United States Institute of Peace findings) estimated that revenues from “pig-butchering” cyber scams in Laos were around US $10.9 billion, which would be *equivalent to more than two-thirds (≈67–70 %) of formal Lao GDP in a recent year." https://globalinitiative.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/GI-TOC-Compound-crime-Cyber-scam-operations-in-Southeast-Asia-May-2025.pdf https://globalinitiative.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/GI-T...
digiown 9mo ago
The WWW has never been a high-trust place. Some smaller communities, sure, but anyone has always been able to write basically what they want on the internet, true or false, as long as it is not illegal in the country hosting it, which is close to nothing in the US. The difference is that there historically weren't much to be gained by annoying or misleading people on the internet, so trolling is mainly motivated by personal satisfaction. Two things changed since then: (1) most people now use the internet as the primary information source, and (2) the cost of creating bullshit has fallen precipitously.
- allenu 9mo ago
  I agree. It's not that the web was high-trust. It was more that if you landed on a niche web page, you knew whoever put it together probably had at least a little expertise (and care) since it wouldn't be worth writing about something that very few people would find and read anyway. Now that it's super cheap to produce niche content, even if very few people find a page, it's "worth it" to produce said garbage as it gives you some easy SEO for very little time investment. The motivation for content online has changed over the last 20 years from people wanting to share things they're interested in to one where the primary goal is to collect eyeballs to make a profit in some way.
PaulDavisThe1st 9mo ago
to be boring, the term "enshittification" was invented by one individual, recently, and has a specific meaning. it does not refer to "things just get worse" but describes a specific strategy adopted by corporations using the internet for commercial purposes.
- LPisGood 9mo ago
  Words change meaning as they are used. Especially negative words that may start rather specific tend to get used more generally until the specificity is lost.
  - PaulDavisThe1st 9mo ago
    "enshittification" was invented within the last couple of years and its inventor is still alive. I'd normally be the first to agree with and push your point about language evolving, but it's not time to apply that to a neologism this young.
    - LPisGood 9mo ago
      I think the fact that it’s primarily an Internet related term that gets used a lot on the Internet, has something to do with the acceleration in the broadening of its meaning
  - anigbrowl 9mo ago
    how about we put some effort into actually picking the correct words and not just handwaving everything? Especially since the whole topic of discussion here is 'internet research is increasingly less reliable because people just wrote/publish any old BS for clicks.'
    - LPisGood 9mo ago
      I don’t think it’s necessarily handwaving. I don’t think anyone has a monopoly on the way language is used and broadening terms is a very natural thing that happens as language evolves
fatherwavelet 8mo ago
The good old days when you could trust everything posted on usenet to be true. We must live on different planets.

PessimalDecimal 9mo ago

It might be more accurate to say that a lot of low-trust societies have become connected to the Internet which weren't nearly as online a couple of decades ago. For example, a huge fraction of the world's spam originates from Russia, India and Bangladesh. And we know that a lot of the romance scams are perpetrated by Chinese gangs operating out of quasi-lawless parts of Myanmar. Not so much from, say, Switzerland.

kgeist 9mo ago
Russia has been among the top sources of spam since the early 2000s, it's not like anything changed lately. Mail-order bride scams and similar peaked in like 2005. It doesn't take a lot of people to send spam, I don't think it's correlated with the general population's online presence. I'd actually say it's quite the opposite: in 2026, Russia has never been more disconnected from the Western parts of the Internet than it is now (the Russian Internet watchdog blocks like 30% of foreign resources since a few years ago, while Russian IPs are routinely banned on Western sites after 2022, I can barely open anything without a VPN). For that reason, and because of limited English proficiency, Russian netizens rarely visit foreign resources these days, except for a few platforms without a good Russian replacement like Instagram and YouTube (both banned btw, only via a VPN), where they usually stay mostly within their Russian-speaking communities. I'm not sure why any of them would be the reason the Internet as a whole has supposedly become low-trust. The OP in question is some SEO company using an LLM to churn out sites with "unique content." We already had this stuff 20 years ago, except the "unique content" was generated by scripts that replaced words with synonyms. Nothing really new here.
- marginalia_nu 9mo ago
  Prigozhin falling out of the metaphorical window also seems to have tempered the amount of political stuff coming directly from Russia.
- expedition32 9mo ago
  Yeah blaming Russians and Chinese for the internet turning to shit is ludicrous. Chinese have their own internet anyway- it was a shock to me at first just how little the average Chinese citizen really cares about Western culture or society. They have their own problems ofcourse but it has nothing to do with us No it's the tens of billions of mostly American capital going into AI data centers and large bullshit models.
  - marginalia_nu 9mo ago
    It's not completely unfounded. A lot of cyber crime adjacent stuff targeting the west is coming from China and Russia. This is a consequence of these countries not having functioning law enforcement cooperation with the west, as well as chilly bordering on hostile diplomatic relations. It's not (always) sanctioned by the governments of these countries, but it's not entirely unwelcome either. Though all that stuff is a very different thing from what's being discussed in this thread.
    - sunaookami 9mo ago
      >A lot of cyber crime adjacent stuff targeting the west is coming from China and Russia. If you trust your government's propaganda that is used to jusitfy "hackbacks" and buying 0-days on the darkweb that fucks us all.
      - marginalia_nu 9mo ago
        Eh, you don't really need to trust any propaganda to see this. Set up an nginx on a public IP and tail its logs. Vulnerability scans will hit you literally non stop so long as it's a western IP. Block China and Russia IPs and it drops by like 90%. Don't get me wrong the west isn't doing much to enforce Russian or Chinese complaints either. It's really just a messy diplomatic situation all around.
blell 9mo ago
70% of the GDP of Laos comes from scamming people in the first world. "A report by the Global Initiative on Transnational Organised Crime (based on United States Institute of Peace findings) estimated that revenues from “pig-butchering” cyber scams in Laos were around US $10.9 billion, which would be *equivalent to more than two-thirds (≈67–70 %) of formal Lao GDP in a recent year." https://globalinitiative.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/GI-TOC-Compound-crime-Cyber-scam-operations-in-Southeast-Asia-May-2025.pdf https://globalinitiative.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/GI-T...

digiown 9mo ago

The WWW has never been a high-trust place. Some smaller communities, sure, but anyone has always been able to write basically what they want on the internet, true or false, as long as it is not illegal in the country hosting it, which is close to nothing in the US. The difference is that there historically weren't much to be gained by annoying or misleading people on the internet, so trolling is mainly motivated by personal satisfaction. Two things changed since then: (1) most people now use the internet as the primary information source, and (2) the cost of creating bullshit has fallen precipitously.

allenu 9mo ago
I agree. It's not that the web was high-trust. It was more that if you landed on a niche web page, you knew whoever put it together probably had at least a little expertise (and care) since it wouldn't be worth writing about something that very few people would find and read anyway. Now that it's super cheap to produce niche content, even if very few people find a page, it's "worth it" to produce said garbage as it gives you some easy SEO for very little time investment. The motivation for content online has changed over the last 20 years from people wanting to share things they're interested in to one where the primary goal is to collect eyeballs to make a profit in some way.

PaulDavisThe1st 9mo ago

to be boring, the term "enshittification" was invented by one individual, recently, and has a specific meaning. it does not refer to "things just get worse" but describes a specific strategy adopted by corporations using the internet for commercial purposes.

LPisGood 9mo ago
Words change meaning as they are used. Especially negative words that may start rather specific tend to get used more generally until the specificity is lost.
- PaulDavisThe1st 9mo ago
  "enshittification" was invented within the last couple of years and its inventor is still alive. I'd normally be the first to agree with and push your point about language evolving, but it's not time to apply that to a neologism this young.
  - LPisGood 9mo ago
    I think the fact that it’s primarily an Internet related term that gets used a lot on the Internet, has something to do with the acceleration in the broadening of its meaning
- anigbrowl 9mo ago
  how about we put some effort into actually picking the correct words and not just handwaving everything? Especially since the whole topic of discussion here is 'internet research is increasingly less reliable because people just wrote/publish any old BS for clicks.'
  - LPisGood 9mo ago
    I don’t think it’s necessarily handwaving. I don’t think anyone has a monopoly on the way language is used and broadening terms is a very natural thing that happens as language evolves

fatherwavelet 8mo ago

The good old days when you could trust everything posted on usenet to be true. We must live on different planets.